1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to the fields of information processing and display by computers, and human-machine interfaces for computers. The present invention further relates to providing the user with improved control over the way that material is displayed, accessed, and reaccessed through networks, particularly the Internet.
2. Description of the Background Art
In the current art, Internet web sites of interest to a user are located at multiple different network locations. For many users, it is inconvenient to access these sites, as they may not all be accessible from a single network location such as a start page or existing portal page. To improve the accessibility of information on the Internet, it would be useful to enable an average user to create her own portal page.
When a user accesses the Internet through a browser, the user is immediately directed to a “start page” that has been prespecified by the user or has been selected by default. At any given time, this “start page” might or might not provide information or direct access to information that is relevant to the reason the user decided to initiate an Internet access session.
Users of the Internet have only minimal control over the contents of their start page or portal page. Unless they have skill in the art of HTML and Javascript programming and can develop a start/portal page that contains precisely the elements that they desire, and have access to a web server that can make this page available to them regardless of what computer they choose to use to access the Internet, the start/portal page that is available to most users does not fulfill the needs of the users.
Moreover, even if a user is capable of programming and making her own start/portal page available over the Internet, said user is not able to easily and quickly make changes to the layout and contents of that page, without modifying the page in a text editor and re-loading the contents of the entire page to the server.
Also, no method is provided in the current art for adding new desired material directly from a different location on the Internet, making it necessary to explicitly type in information necessary to identify the start/portal page content.
Moreover, users not intimately familiar with the Internet may not be able to make informed decisions about what material to select to appear on their start/portal page. No method in the current art provides a way to take advantage of the collective understanding of a community of web users to customize a start/portal page in accordance with the experience of the community and the desires of an individual user.
The current art also provides no means to “frame” content from other web sites on a start/portal page in a way that provides the user useful access both to the “framed” content and to other content or links selected by the user.
The current art provides no means to resize material framed from other web sites, or to pre-scroll such framed content to a desired web page location.
The current art provides no repository of start/portal pages specifically tailored to users of specific backgrounds or with specific interests.
The current art of customizable start/portal pages provides no mechanism to display an unlimited number of items on a start/portal page (which may include links, menus, framed content, images, text, or material that would otherwise require the user to fill out a form), such that any predefined desired page is accessible to a user with zero or one click.
Further, in the current art, a person or group of persons conducting Internet research on a specific topic has at best imperfect options for recording his or her research. While the computer that the user does the research on might be capable of storing the websites visited by the user in a retrievable manner, either by use of a “favorites” function or a “history” function, this information is not readily available to users from a remote computer. In addition, these functions do not provide an easy means for identifying the significance of stored links, or even associating the stored links with a specific research project.
Therefore, there is a need for an improved customizable start/portal page for Internet users, as well as an improved method for keeping track of websites visited for research purposes.